Mountain Dew - Realise Your Audience and Cater to Them

As everyone keeps saying, a brand is never just the logo, the packaging or the tagline.

It is so much more than that. It is the devotion of the consumer that makes a brand, a BRAND.

This unfaltering devotion isn’t born in a day. It cannot be conceived by copywriters and art directors in a branding agency. It has to be built like a wall, by the same people mentioned above, with all the worldly support from the company itself.

The first step in understanding the brand’s audience is to build a foundation for it to stand on. It starts by getting to know who the audience is on a demographic, cultural and emotional level.

This helps build a buyer persona, which in turn helps market the product to these audiences.

Brand audience is relative and differs extensively from one brand to the other.

While most brands go all-out, without much research to backup their actions during marketing, few test the waters and make the best of it.

Even these brands, the ones who are vigilant, get caught off guard by missing out on a lump segment of the audience that aren’t taken advantage of. Very few have successfully capitalised on them.

Mountain Dew is leaps and bounds ahead of the rest, thanks to their audience specific marketing.

They were part of the audience pool that never cared that much for the sun or the fresh air or any physical activity. They were different from the adrenaline junkies of Red bull, skateboarders of Pepsi and moms and pops of Coca-Cola.

They were gamers, video game loving, PlayStation loving gamers. They were the ones who spent weekends inside their homes. They were the ones who went to the supermarket and left with 2 or 3 cases of carbonated drinks.

Unlike Red bull’s extreme sports enthusiasts, these were average people, sitting behind a screen, in the comforts of their home.

The traditional ways were not going to be helpful. Flyers, hoardings, television commercials and newspaper ads could not make a dent.